How do I see which API endpoints are used most?

To see which API endpoints are used most, you generally want to aggregate request counts by endpoint path over a time window.

Typical approaches

1) From API gateway / ingress logs

If you have logs from:

• API Gateway
• Nginx / Apache
• Load balancer
• Kubernetes ingress
• Application server logs

you can count requests grouped by endpoint.

Example logic:

SELECT endpoint, COUNT(*) AS hits
FROM api_logs
WHERE timestamp >= NOW() - INTERVAL '24 hours'
GROUP BY endpoint
ORDER BY hits DESC;

2) From metrics in observability tools

If you use tools like:

• Prometheus + Grafana
• Datadog
• New Relic
• CloudWatch

look for metrics such as:

• http_requests_total
• request_count
• api_calls

Then group by labels like:

• route
• path
• resource
• endpoint

Example PromQL:

topk(10, sum by (route) (rate(http_requests_total[5m])))

3) From application instrumentation

If your app records request traces or metrics, you can:

• add middleware to log the route
• increment counters per endpoint
• export to your monitoring system

This is often better than raw URL strings, because it can normalize:

• /users/123 → /users/{id} so dynamic IDs don’t create many separate endpoints.

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Important tip: normalize endpoint patterns

Count the route template, not the raw URL, or results get fragmented.

Bad:

• /users/1
• /users/2
• /users/3

Good:

• /users/{id}

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If you’re using a specific tool

I can give you exact steps/queries for:

• AWS API Gateway / CloudWatch
• Nginx logs
• Prometheus / Grafana
• Datadog
• Elastic / Kibana
• Postgres / SQL logs

If you tell me your stack, I’ll show the exact query or dashboard setup.